As I have mentioned before, I started reading dystopias at eight. This naturally led to my reading science fiction or SF (never scifi) and the third book was, as I have said, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, in the Wellsian tradition.

But it wasn’t all literary. Dreck. I craved dreck! As someone once said, it’s time to get SF out of the universities, and back in the gutter where it belongs. So I was intrigued by this list of best SF of the last 50 years, at tikistitch, via Pharyngula. The titles I have read are in bold.

The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov

Dune, Frank Herbert

Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

Neuromancer, William Gibson

Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick

The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.

The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov

Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras

Cities in Flight, James Blish

The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett

Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison

Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison

The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester

Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany

Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey

Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card

The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson

The Forever War, Joe Haldeman

Gateway, Frederik Pohl

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

I Am Legend, Richard Matheson

Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

Little, Big, John Crowley

Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny

The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick

Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement

More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon

The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith

On the Beach, Nevil Shute

Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke

Ringworld, Larry Niven

Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys

The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien

Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner

The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester

Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein

Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock

The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks

Timescape, Gregory Benford

To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

But where is No enemy but time? by Michael Bishop? Dragon’s Egg by Robert L. Forward? And why include the ones I marked in italic as SF? Fantasy ain’t SF, dude.

Late change: I read the Wikipedia entry for Children of the Atom, and I recall the story line, so I added it.

Comments

What amazes me is that I’ve read almost all the SF books you have and I’m not a fan. The other interesting thing: very few of these books were published in the last decade or two. Where are the recent SF books that are worth reading?

Anyway… Neal Stephenson and Greg Egan are the current writers who I feel have best explored our techonological future. If we ever do colonise the solar system, Ben Bova and Stephen Baxter may well be cited as influential.

Reynolds got me reading hard SF again after a couple of years of burn-out (for which I blame Egan’s ‘Diaspora’, I’m afraid). He’s good, and I find that his style is slightly better than Baxter’s. John Meaney’s ‘To Hold Infinity’ is also worth it.

Paul (J) McAuley is also worth it; he’s one of those rare sf authors who’s trained as a biologist and it shows. The same goes for Brian Stapleford — his ‘Architects of Emortality’ sequence is quite neat.

Adam Roberts is good at wrongfooting the reader. Bit of an acquired taste, though.

I’m tempted to recommend Hal Duncan’s ‘Vellum’ and ‘Ink’, though strictly they’re Sam Delaney-style soft sf/fantasy (very, very modernist) with Sumerian overtones, as they’re the best things I read in the last year or so, but they might not be to everyone’s taste. (Duncan has a deep dislike of sub-genre distinctions, so it follows that everything gets a bit wierd. But good though. Very, very good.)

John Wilkins: are you saying that you don’t like the speculative genetics in “Darwin’s Radio”? Or the bio-nanotechnology of Blood Music? Or don’t like what he did in his posthumous Foundation novel in Asimov’s universe? Or don’t like his style?

And why include the ones I marked in italic as SF? Fantasy ain’t SF, dude.

I think I stopped caring about that when I was 19 or so.
I suggest you read some good old-fashioned sword-and-planet, like Leigh Brackett’s The Ginger Star , The Hounds of Skaith , The Reavers of Skaith , so you can see how pointless it is to look for distinctions a significant portion of readers will agree on.

Go find a copy of Crowley’s Little, Big. It’s fantasy, not science fiction at all, but it’s rich and beautiful and sad and sweet and one of the best damn things I’ve ever read.

Second recommendation for Peter Watts. Three of his books are available as downloads at rifters.com (http://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm). Warning: Don’t look for happy talk. Reviewer James Nicoll says, “Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.” On the other hand, his slide show “Vampire Domestication” at http://rifters.com/real/progress.htm is hilarious.